Take a break. Take care of yourself. You don't need to justify your own unhappiness. Arctic Raoul and Hertha will still be there when you're feeling better.
The trouble is that -- in my experience -- it doesn't actually work that way; once you let a story go 'off the boil' it's desperately difficult to revive it again. It was probably a mistake to start this one, but having started it I have a responsibility to it.
Arctic Raoul is in serious danger of passing into oblivion and never being published anywhere, on fanfiction.net or elsewhere. The trouble is that it is so much harder to bring myself to edit finished work than it is to do practically anything else. I seem to have two modes of work: 'right now' and 'indefinitely postponed', and if a task misses the first easy moment of impulse (or requires more than a moment's initial effort to get started) then it is in severe danger of never happening at all. I have far, far, far too many unanswered emails, reviews I should have written, bug reports I should have sent in, pieces of mending and ironing and cleaning that have been waiting for months... and I don't even have paid duties to keep me from them. (In fact, ironically, if I had less time I suspect I might achieve more.)
Every day I wake up -- albeit often in the afternoon -- with the resolution that today I will achieve one of those postponed tasks, and yet day by day the weeks slip by. I am just about clinging on to Hertha by the tips of my fingers (she is currently perusing a letter from 'O.G.', though I am not sure where this scene is going) by trying to force myself to take regular walks and to take the manuscript with me; if I left it here to be worked on at the table nothing would happen. Often not very much happens in the course of an hour's walk (and sometimes after a month or so of abysmally slow progress I end up discarding the lot!) Today I went cycling instead, which means I haven't written anything, though I am better exercised -- I was quite pleased with myself last night, but now realise that I'm not sure how to continue.
Unfortunately I feel that I do need to justify my own unhappiness, because I am not 'unhappy' enough to justify neglecting things. It would not cost me anything bar a stamp -- and I laid in a stock for that purpose -- to reply to my brother's letters of this autumn, or to telephone the exceedingly ancient relative who sent me a gift voucher for Christmas despite the fact that I haven't sent her a present or even contacted her in years (and she probably won't be alive next year) All it takes is a bit of 'getting round to it', and I have grown so accustomed to letting things slide if they feel the least bit difficult that, like Bree and Hwin in the Calormene desert, I seem to have lost the power of making *myself* do things if other people don't compel me to do them.
I sound ridiculous, since you're at least a decade older than me, but I don't know what else to say.
When I was younger I kept acquiring a series of surrogate mothers; now I seem to end up acquiring a succession of surrogate fandom daughters ;-p
no subject
The trouble is that -- in my experience -- it doesn't actually work that way; once you let a story go 'off the boil' it's desperately difficult to revive it again. It was probably a mistake to start this one, but having started it I have a responsibility to it.
Arctic Raoul is in serious danger of passing into oblivion and never being published anywhere, on fanfiction.net or elsewhere. The trouble is that it is so much harder to bring myself to edit finished work than it is to do practically anything else. I seem to have two modes of work: 'right now' and 'indefinitely postponed', and if a task misses the first easy moment of impulse (or requires more than a moment's initial effort to get started) then it is in severe danger of never happening at all. I have far, far, far too many unanswered emails, reviews I should have written, bug reports I should have sent in, pieces of mending and ironing and cleaning that have been waiting for months... and I don't even have paid duties to keep me from them. (In fact, ironically, if I had less time I suspect I might achieve more.)
Every day I wake up -- albeit often in the afternoon -- with the resolution that today I will achieve one of those postponed tasks, and yet day by day the weeks slip by. I am just about clinging on to Hertha by the tips of my fingers (she is currently perusing a letter from 'O.G.', though I am not sure where this scene is going) by trying to force myself to take regular walks and to take the manuscript with me; if I left it here to be worked on at the table nothing would happen. Often not very much happens in the course of an hour's walk (and sometimes after a month or so of abysmally slow progress I end up discarding the lot!) Today I went cycling instead, which means I haven't written anything, though I am better exercised -- I was quite pleased with myself last night, but now realise that I'm not sure how to continue.
Unfortunately I feel that I do need to justify my own unhappiness, because I am not 'unhappy' enough to justify neglecting things. It would not cost me anything bar a stamp -- and I laid in a stock for that purpose -- to reply to my brother's letters of this autumn, or to telephone the exceedingly ancient relative who sent me a gift voucher for Christmas despite the fact that I haven't sent her a present or even contacted her in years (and she probably won't be alive next year) All it takes is a bit of 'getting round to it', and I have grown so accustomed to letting things slide if they feel the least bit difficult that, like Bree and Hwin in the Calormene desert, I seem to have lost the power of making *myself* do things if other people don't compel me to do them.
When I was younger I kept acquiring a series of surrogate mothers; now I seem to end up acquiring a succession of surrogate fandom daughters ;-p